The Evolution of Web & App Design

In 2005 Lance Armstrong won a record seventh straight Tour de France title, Microsoft founder Bill Gates received an honorary knighthood and Prince Charles got married. Meanwhile, the Facebook website was available to a limited number of students at colleges across the United States. The site, which was found at the web address – ‘thefacebook.com’ back then, was founded a year earlier by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. Today the site is boasts over 1.5 billion users, and comes in third in terms of the most visited websites in the world, behind Google.com and Youtube.com

Interestingly, the layout and design of these top 3 websites appears to have changed very little. Whereas the homepages of Microsoft.com and Apple.com are barely recognisable. Gone are the busy, text-heavy homepages – replaced with clean, minimalistic designs. Apps have been around for well over a decade too, with the first mainstream smartphone coming in the form of the Blackberry in 2002. Again, as the speed of mobile-internet improved, and as the processing-power of smartphones has increased, app design has changed along with them. Orega has done an excellent job of putting together an easy way to compare the old and the new.